You can be a beautiful and gifted writer yet fail to craft a compelling narrative. Joshua Henkin, in the latest Glimmer Train bulletin, elucidates, in a memorable and striking way, how to check your work for two critical factors of a successful story:
For a story to work, there needs to be both consequence and agency, and one way to tell whether your story is succeeding in this regard is to ask yourself a couple of questions. First, type your scenes out on separate sheets of paper so that it’s possible to scramble them. Can you scramble them? You shouldn’t be able to. … If you can reorder them, then the odds are your story isn’t driven sufficiently by consequence. Second, ask yourself what would happen if you yanked your protagonist out of the story. If the only thing the story would lose was your protagonist’s observations … then the odds are there’s insufficient agency in your story.
Read Henkin’s entire piece at the Glimmer Train site.
Also, check out these other articles:
- On achieving needed focus to start writing, from Maggie Shipstead
- On the difference between short stories and novels, from David Ebenbach
- On the risk and reward of writing what you know, from Natalie Sypolt
Jane Friedman has spent nearly 25 years working in the book publishing industry, with a focus on author education and trend reporting. She is the editor of The Hot Sheet, the essential publishing industry newsletter for authors, and was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World in 2023. Her latest book is The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press), which received a starred review from Library Journal. In addition to serving on grant panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Work Fund, she works with organizations such as The Authors Guild to bring transparency to the business of publishing.
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What does he mean by agency?
A protagonist who acts—makes choices—and is not passive.
Such a great post. Love the idea of scrambling scenes. Brilliant.
I love Glimmer Train! I’d been with them since the beginning – I wish I’d kept the first issue…might be a collector’s item one day 😉 – and I’m pleased they’ve done so well.
Very good advice from Henkin (and thank you for explaining “agency;” I wondered about that myself).
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